Digital Strategy Guide: Part 2 Competitor Research

Welcome to part 2 of our digital strategy guide for 2014. In part 1, we outlined the best and worst SEO techniques. This month we will be giving you vital information on conducting competitor research.

Competitor research is a key component for every digital marketing strategy. It helps you understand your competitor’s online marketing tactics and helps you keep one step ahead of them. The areas that we recommend researching include:

Web design and development

Keyword research

Content development and marketing

Social media

SEO

Web Design and Development

Understanding how your competitor’s website was built and how the main functions work gives you an idea into their main website goals. While you should never copy your competitors design, understanding which features are successful can help your own web design and development process.

Web Development

To identify what platform a websites was built with and the hosting they use you can use a tool called Built With. Built With provides you with data on:

What platform a site is built with – eg. WordPress or Joomla

The widgets and plugins that a site is using

Hosting providers

Server information

Calls to Actions

We recommended manually identifying all the calls to action on your competitor’s website. They could be:

Contact forms

Phone numbers

Email addresses

Newsletter sign up’s

PDF downloads

Video plays

Buy now buttons

Questions to ask in this area include:

Is there anything to learn from your competitors calls to action?

Can you identify their strong calls to action and replicate something similar?

Are we using similar calls to action?

USPs and Messaging

How a websites USPs and messaging is displayed can be a factor in audience conversion rate. Examine how your competitors USPs are conveyed:

In the design

Landing page content

Blog content

Keyword Research

Knowing what keywords your competitors use in their Meta Titles and Descriptions can help you identify their Keyword focus. . This information can be useful for:

Keeping up to date with industry terms

Knowing what keywords are important to your competitors

Helping you build your own keyword lists

You can use a tool called Screaming Frog to quickly scan your competitors Meta Data and generate an Excel with the results.

Keyword Analysis and Difficulty

Another way of using keyword data is to find out what competitors are ranking for particular Keywords. You might be surprised and find that the list includes competitors you haven’t heard of before!

You can use a tool called the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool to find out what websites are on the first page of Google. The tool also estimates the relative competitiveness of the Keyword . This benchmark is useful as it helps you set realistic goals for your own Keyword performance.

Content Development and Marketing

Analysing your competitor’s content should be one of the main areas to focus your research on. Content is at the core of every great digital marketing strategy. A review of your competitor’s approach can provide you with valuable insights into these areas.

Areas to review:

Landing page content

Resources – evergreen content etc.

FAQs

Products and services pages

Slides

Video content

Images

Blogs

Newsletters

When reviewing your competitor’s content there are a number of questions to keep in mind:

What tone is the content taking?

What are the main calls to action?

What multimedia are they using?

How often are they posting content?

How is their content been shared? Eg. Facebook Like, Retweet, Google+1

Do they have a long term linkable asset? Eg. Resource area, guides etc.

Social Media

Social media can be a valuable source of traffic as long as you choose the right platform for your business. Researching your competitors’ social media profiles can help identity relevant platforms. If all your competitors are engaging with a particular social media platform, and you are not , you could be missing out on valuable leads.

SEO

SEO can influence how Google ranks a website in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). By conducting SEO research on your competitor’s website you can find out information that can help define your own SEO strategy. The areas of a website that you need to research and tools to help include:

After compiling your competitor research you can understand what direction your competitors are taking with their digital marketing strategy. This can help inform your own strategy and for make better decisions going forward.

Tune in to part 3 of our digital strategy guide where we will look at content marketing for SMEs in more detail.

We have created a Slideshare presentation that outlines the main points in the article. Feel free to embed the presentation on your website.